Down To Earth

Editorial. Sunita Narain.
VI. XVIII. XIV

Roads are
meant for walking

by Sunita
Narain

In India, traffic
accidents are not on the health agenda. It is time
the agenda is changed. Last week when the Union
Minister for Rural Development met with an
unfortunate and tragic accident on the road in
Delhi, the issue was highlighted. But as yet,
there is little understanding of the seriousness
of the problem, and why India, which has just
begun to motorise, needs to take action, and
fast.

For me, the news of the
minister’s death was particularly
distressing. It hit me that seven months ago I was
on the same road—South Delhi’s
Aurobindo Marg—when my cycle was hit by a
reversing car. I was lucky that Good Samaritans
picked me up, took me to the same Jai Prakash
Narain Apex Trauma Centre at AIIMS where minister
Gopinath Munde was taken. The same wonderful group
of doctors, who tried their best to resuscitate
Munde, worked to repair my hands and nose, and
stop internal bleeding. I was fortunate. I
survived. But Munde, who had much to do in his
life, did not. This waste of human lives because
of sheer apathy and negligence should make us
angry. It should make us change the way we design
our roads, enforce traffic rules and, most
importantly, take responsibility for our
driving.

World Health
Organization (WHO) lists traffic-related accidents
as one of the top health agendas of the world. It
says road accidents globally are the leading cause
of deaths among young people between 15 and 29
years of age. Worse, it is in lower- and
middle-income countries with fewer vehicles that
90 per cent of the accidents occur. We have
started to drive, but without the roads and laws
that ensure safety. who also finds that nearly
half the people who die in road accidents are
pedestrians, bicyclists and
motorcyclists—vulnerable road
users.

In Delhi, the traffic
police database of accidents shows a small
downward trend, which is good news. But it also
shows that of the 1,600 people who were killed in
2013 in traffic accidents, as many as 673 people
were pedestrians. Their only fault was that they
did not realise that the city does not give them
the right to walk. The vulnerable road
users—cyclists, pedestrians, cycle rickshaw
users and motorcyclists—made up 81 per cent
of those who died. The situation is the same in
all our cities. Clearly, our roads are not meant
for anybody who is not in a large powerful
vehicle.

It is not surprising
that 60 per cent of these accidents in Delhi were
because of what police classified as the
driver’s fault—speeding, disobeying
traffic rules and driving dangerously. In most
cases, the vehicle that hits someone is never
caught. In my case, the car hit and fled. I had no
time to take down its registration number. There
are no CCTV cameras in Delhi that capture
accidents in real time. There is no way to catch,
let alone convict, the culprit.

This is not all. We are
not even designing our roads for safe use. We
cannot walk, nor can we cycle in our cities. We
cannot even cross the road safely to take a
bus. Roads are engineered for cars. In this way
cars, which transport less than 13 per cent of
Delhi’s daily commuters, take 90 per cent of
the road space.

The agenda for change is
not impossible. First, we need to urgently amend
the outdated Motor Vehicles Act. It needs to
provide effective deterrence against illegal or
irresponsible driving. At present, the penalty
against misdemeanour is Rs 100. Just think, how
will this stop anyone from parking cars on
footpaths or from not driving irresponsibly?
Secondly, we need to adopt new technologies for
on-road surveillance and compliance. Delhi has
some 100 cranes to tow away illegally parked
vehicles. The rest of the world, which has taken
to driving, pays the cost of enforcement, from
installing parking meters to on-road CCTV cameras.
The third agenda is to urgently fix the
registration database of vehicles so that those
who drive irresponsibly know they will be found,
caught and penalised. This can only happen through
annual vehicle fitness and registration
systems.

The bottom line
is if we are rich enough to drive, we have to be
rich enough to be responsible for our
driving.